As Conroy and his son Junior were latching the corral, a car stalled on the road outside Carcassonne. Junior said, “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know, bud.”
The driver-side window rolled down. Behind it, a man wearing sunglasses and a white bucket hat smiled at them with rows of bright spotless dentures.
“Wait here,” Conroy said.
Was the man lost? Several towns—some of which still appeared on maps of eastern Washington—had dried up in the past few years, now nothing but prairie grass and empty homesteads.
Conroy had a four-inch folding knife tucked in his right boot. He walked over to the road: “Looking for Carcassonne?” he said. “It’s ten minutes down the highway.”
The man removed his hat. He wore a matching white golf shirt and was pressing an electrolarynx against his lower jaw: “Are you John Conroy?”
“That’s the name on the deed.”
“This must be Whitman County. It’s all brown, hard to tell where you’re driving. Glad I found you at home.”
The man was familiar—someone from Boston, where Conroy hadn’t set foot in fifteen years. But he had trouble identifying the ears and chin and fingers, and didn’t bother with the voice.
Conroy said, “Ranchers don’t have spare time.”
The visitor shook his head. He chuckled, then spoke again through his device: “I’d never waste your time, Mister Conroy. Back east, there’s a guy who’d like to buy all twelve acres of this ranch—by calling it a ranch, I’m being kind. Most of the families in Whitman own at least a hundred acres. They drive herds fifteen times bigger than yours. Which is what, exactly? A few heifers, a steer. Not sure what you’d call that fella, but I can see his ribs. Take my advice: the buyer’s visiting Carcassonne in a few days, and if he finds you here, he’ll get upset. One of those angry guys. Hair-trigger temper. And you know the worst part? He’s only five foot four.”
“If he’s buying my land,” Conroy said, “where’s the money?”
“You want payment. Of course, I understand. This buyer pays in advance, by letting you know he’s coming to town. You should be elsewhere.”
“He can shove it up his ass. And if you don’t drive far away from me and my family—”
The man turned on the car stereo. It was an ancient chant, something Gregory himself might have sung a thousand years ago. He gave Conroy a sneer: “I’m trying to help you, family man. A kid but no wife, some random broad though you love her all the same. Maybe less than staying alive.” The man closed his tinted window and drove out to Highway 26, past the long walls of the coulee.
Back at the corral, Conroy told his son to help make dinner.
“What did that guy say?” Junior asked.
“He needed directions,” Conroy said. “Never mind. Before you go inside, let’s haul those bundles down from the truck…”
As they ate, Alicia said another homestead had been abandoned off Highway 90. A dozen towns south of Spokane relied on groundwater. Carcassonne had a basalt aquifer, though one more drought might force everyone to leave the county.
“And where would we go?” Conroy said. “It’s the same everywhere, you never get a break. This is our home. We’ll stay so long as there’s water, then longer.”
Junior and his mother went to bed. Conroy stayed up in the living room, which had a pair of tall windows facing the highway. At three o’clock, he turned out the lights and waited on the floor. Ten minutes later, the man’s car stopped in front of the ranch, stalled, sped off.
Now he recognized the driver—Nico. He’d last seen him ten years ago in Vancouver. Around that time, Conroy began using his current alias: born Francis Petruzzi, he grew up in the North End of Boston when men of respect still met around the back of the Palermo Social Club. His father was an associate of the Angiulo brothers and stayed in contact with them after moving his own family to Revere. The North Shore had as many gangsters as the city. At sixteen, Conroy dropped out of high school and began his apprenticeship as a delivery boy. He worked a lot with Nico. Together they earned enough for a timeshare on the Cape and two seats at the Palermo bar.
Conroy’s first prison term came at nineteen, when he was caught driving a stolen Nissan with five thousand dollars’ worth of silverware in the trunk, as well as gunpowder residue on his cuffs. The cops asked if he worked for Esposito, if he knew about last month’s shooting at the Quincy quarry. Conroy said nothing. In his last months at Walpole, he bunked with an accountant who stole three million from his State Street clients.
Conroy said, “You don’t look like a crook—why?”
“Maybe I was chasing the white whale.”
“You were a cokehead?”
“It’s a book, genius—Moby Dick. Boring until the whale turns up. You don’t need to read the whole thing, just the last fifty pages.”
To Conroy, this book about a white whale named Moby Dick sounded like a code for queers. But he respected literate men.
After he left prison, some Hanover Street friends got Conroy a piece of work at the Bennigan’s parking lot in Dorchester. And soon enough there he was, two days out of Walpole, squatting between big blue dumpsters as a Cadillac El Dorado parked in the owner’s spot. Conroy checked the cylinder of his revolver, snapped it shut. When the Cadillac’s engine cut off, the passenger door opened and he took in the target’s wardrobe: loafers, silk Armani slacks, a ruby signet ring. It was Esposito. Someone must have figured Conroy for a rat, because no one could hit Esposito and survive the week.
He walked toward the car and fired twice. It had been years since he’d held a gun: the first round flew wide of Esposito’s skull by three or four inches. The second missed his neck but landed below the collarbone, pinning him against the Cadillac. The driver emerged from his side with a MAC-10 and Conroy sprinted down the street.
He ran as far as Mattapan before dialing Nico. No response. Then he got a call from an unlisted number.
“I’m in Montreal,” Nico said. “What’s up?”
“Need to vanish for a few days.”
“Tell me what happened.”
Conroy stopped and stood beside an oak tree; dealers on the sidewalk pretended not to notice him. “Honestly?” he said. “I left the pen, they called me for a job. Next thing, I’m aiming my snub nose at Esposito.”
“Is he dead?”
“Didn’t stick around.”
“OK, where are you?”
“Somewhere I’d rather leave.”
“You know the island?”
“The island?”
“Really, it’s a peninsula. Few miles north of Rockport past Route One. Old bootlegger hideout. Set up camp and one of my Gloucester guys will meet you there. The boat sails to Halifax. And don’t worry about a passport.”
Nico was working for the Rizzuto family: white nights on the shore of the Eye of Ireland, where he waited for trawlers transporting heroin from Sicily and Naples. The Rizzutos, he said, paid more than the Patriarcas. Even better, they would never get busted…
Coffin Island was fifty acres of rocks, sea grass, and poison ivy. The cliffside had dozens of snake holes, and a fog horn blared every two minutes down the shore. Soaked, Conroy went inside the old lighthouse and closed his eyes. Despite his exhaustion, he stayed awake wondering if Coffin Island, too, was a set-up. A boat might dock on the shore—one from the Charles marina rather than Gloucester, with gunmen from Revere and Peabody rather than some deadbeat, dope fiend fisherman…
At the start of a foggy dawn, he heard boots scraping up the hill. By noon, Conroy found himself in the port of Halifax, where he was given both a passport and a sedan that he steered from the Maritimes to Laval. Nico set him up with bikers from the Rock Machine. For six months, he drove a truck transporting cocaine across southern Quebec until the Hells Angels stuck a pipe bomb beneath his hood. Conroy moved to Vancouver and started a pill farm, selling ecstasy downtown to clubbers and students. After buying another American passport, Conroy went to Seattle, where he first met Alicia.
They soon left the city for the scablands, fifty miles south of Spokane near the Idaho line. With his pill money, he bought a ranch and fifteen head of cattle. He introduced himself to the other ranchers as John Conroy from Providence, while following the news stories about his old friends and associates in Boston. Even Nico, who had fled to the Northern Kingdom in Vermont after his indictment, was eventually caught and sentenced to ten years.
***
Conroy felt bad the cigarettes had caught up with Nico, but the man’s health was his least concern.
He spent the afternoon wiping down his truck, then searched the ranch for bombs, wires, pinhole cameras. He opened the wall that stored his long arms—two AR-15 rifles and a scoped shotgun. Next to the green fir tree, he set a bear trap. And while installing his own camera below the front gable, Alicia came over and stood at the foot of the ladder.
“What happened to the yard?” she said.
“Yesterday, I saw some coyotes at Brewer’s place. Licking their paws and farting.”
“Jed’s here.”
“For what?”
“You know what.”
Jed was a neighbor on the road to Carcassonne, an old man whose son had been jailed for meth possession. “It happened again,” he said. “Got no respect for people’s property, John. That black Angus wandered off and chewed all my hay.”
Conroy had forgotten about the black Angus. Following Nico’s visit, he’d thought of nothing but securing the ranch for a siege.
“I’ll find him,” Conroy said.
“You know all that China business dropped the price of beef. We’ll be lucky to last the summer. And if you had more pride, some real sales—well, hell, you could buy your own hay… Tell you what, why not sell me your jackhammer? Mine’s broken and you haven’t moved those posts in weeks.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“I’m not here to buy a jackhammer,” Jed said. “And if I find your steer in my corral, he won’t be running home to the saddest ranch in Whitman.”
“Are you a cuckold, Jed?”
“What?”
“Simple question. Does a tall dark man slip it in your wife while you’re out buying feed? Or those goddamn hay bales?”
Jed said, “You know I dry my own hay. It’s a point of pride. Should know better than to accuse me.”
“Sure,” Conroy said. “The Angus stays on my land. Thanks for stopping, and I’ll check the price of beef.”
Upstairs, Alicia was giving Junior a math lesson. Conroy drove his truck to downtown Carcassonne, which had a bank, small café, and general store. A few blocks north were two old miner’s huts hewn from basalt. The town had spent thousands of dollars on their restoration and planned on renting the huts to tourists. Tourists, Conroy thought. You’d have to be kidnapped.
He parked at the general store, went inside and struck up a conversation with the cashier, an electrician’s daughter named Molly. “Seen a guy,” Conroy said, “with one of those voice boxes for his throat?”
Molly said, “Something wrong?”
“Not exactly. See, my brother flew out of Providence and insisted on driving down here from Sea-Tac. I told Vince, listen—it’s not like the projects, with a sign on every corner. Out here, there’s no corners. It’s all parallel lines. But he don’t listen, because he’s the big brother even though I’m forty-three and he’s forty-five. Funny, right? Now he’s calling me because the GPS is dead and his car’s lost in the hills. You know how it is.”
“Haven’t seen him, but if I do, I’ll call you. Or Alicia.”
“Thanks.”
Conroy left the store. He was confronted in the parking lot by Nico, who no longer held an electrolarynx under his chin. He wore green contacts and the tip of his nose was bandaged
“You shouldn’t be looking for me,” Nico said. “Never took you for a cowboy, Frank. There’s much better work for your hands.”
“Mistaken identity,” Conroy said. “I left all my friends back east. Some are no longer walking, not on two legs.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, friend. Take a look.” Nico flipped open an old passport, Conroy’s first—a sixteen-year-old Italian boy flying to Campania.
“So what? Esposito’s no Don.”
Nico put a manicured hand to his belly and laughed. “He is now, Frank. And Esposito and his friends will be here soon. I’m early for the meet-and-greet.”
“He doesn’t know you’re in Carcassonne,” Conroy said. “Who does?”
“Christ on the cross. Maybe those Boise girls I lined up for tonight. So please, do yourself a favor and head north for a few weeks. Know they got Rockies in Alberta?”
“Thanks for the advice. Hey, maybe he sends some guys to the ranch. We play a little poker, drink a few whiskies, go to bed dreaming we hit the lotto.”
“Be smart, Frank—I cared enough to warn you.”
Nico left and Conroy looked through the tall glass door. Molly leaned over the counter, staring back at him. She had seen the whole thing. Maybe, Frank thought, she knew brotherly love was different back east. The ranchers had their own problems, in their own ways.
At home, Alicia sat on the porch with her legs crossed, cigarette in hand. She said, “Check the green fir. There’s a present for you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Did you set a bear trap?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it trapped something. Not a bear.”
“Is it the Angus?”
“Go see.”
Conroy said, “Why are you so pissed? It’s three in the afternoon and the steps smell like rum. Thought we’d lay off a week or two.”
“It’s just for today,” she said. “I want to talk about the man who stopped here. And the cameras and the guns.”
“I’ve always had those cameras.”
“Maybe, but what about some stranger who’s got you acting nervous?”
“Nervous? He drove here from Boise and offered to buy the ranch. I told him: go back to Idaho, invest in boll weevils.”
“John…baby, are you in witness protection?”
“What?”
“I know there are things you can’t tell me,” Alicia said. “I’ve always known, and we’ve never needed to talk about it. But until now, we’ve been safe. Junior’s safe. If that changes, I need to know. If we have to leave—”
“We’re staying on the ranch,” Conroy said. “Can’t you see that’s the point? And now you ask me about witness protection? Do I look like a collaborator? A rat? You were OK with a rat as Junior’s father?”
“Whatever you did, or didn’t do, it’s in the past.”
“No one’s getting hurt. All right, a long time ago the cops chased me out of Boston. I moved to Montreal. When we met in Seattle, I’d been selling pills for a year. We’re still living off that money.”
“Then you admit it’s not from cattle.”
“If there’s a problem,” Conroy said, “we solve it. Life goes on. There’s no vacation for a rancher, and I don’t give a damn about people in town.”
“About everyone whispering behind your back?”
“I’m a man—we stand alone.”
“Careful what you wish.”
“Two hours until dinner,” Conroy said. “I wish you and Junior luck in the kitchen.”
Conroy left Alicia on the porch and ventured out beyond the hillocks, where he heard a faint whimper. Sure enough, a mole was stuck in the trap, rasping its last few breaths. Back at the ranch he cleaned and lubricated his shotgun.
It grew dark as Conroy waited for Nico in the tin roof barn. At two in the morning, he arrived. He sniffed the air, drew a flask from his pocket, and took a sip. When Nico screwed back the top, Conroy fired two slugs and hit him below the ribs. The blast spun him to the right, twisting his legs into each other, and he fell to the dirt. Conroy switched on the lamp.
Nico lay stretched on his back, moaning into the dust.
“Termites,” Conroy said.
Blood leaked from Nico’s belly, blackening the ground. It was a sucking wound. He gagged on his tongue as he crawled feebly across the barn floor.
Conroy loaded two more slugs in the shotgun. “This is my home,” he said. “The name’s John Conroy. I’m a rancher in Whitman County, Washington. I have a woman and a son and fifteen head of cattle. You could be sixteen… prices are low...”
***
Above the butte were a million stars. Conroy stopped his truck a mile east of the county line, close to the Indian reservation. He spent an hour digging with a manuring shovel. Conroy had drained Nico’s blood into one of his stock tanks, then cut off the arms and legs with a nine-inch cleaver. He tossed the bags into the pit and spit on the last of them.
“Welcome to Coffin Island,” Conroy said.
When he returned to the ranch, Alicia and Junior were gone.
Conroy stayed up all night smoking cigarettes. Around noon, he skipped lunch and went to sleep on the living room sofa. Later he patrolled the woods, looking for any sign of disturbance. He drove up and down the access road before leaving town.
The scablands of eastern Washington had formed tens of thousands of years ago, when a glacial ice dam in present-day Montana cracked and sent immense floods across the northwest. In fact, the scablands were the closest thing on earth to Martian outflow channels: among the tumbleweeds and sage brush ran huge coulees, dry falls, streamlined hills, current ripples, gravel bars. Next to the basalt columns, the land was dotted with boulders and potholes and ripple marks. In their alien harshness, the scablands reminded Conroy of his night on Coffin Island: wet from rain, blind from fog, deaf from the horn blaring every two minutes, and sitting in an old lighthouse with rats and snakes.
Someday he’d read the end of Moby Dick…
As he neared the county line, Conroy kept his speed five miles above the limit. The sheriff was following him on the highway, only a few seconds behind his truck. Conroy had been sober before getting on the road; if Favre suspected him of killing Nico, why leave off the siren? Conroy pulled over to the rail as the cruiser drove straight ahead, moving even faster. Maybe the sheriff was also on his way to Drummond Joe’s; after all, a man was motivated by more than justice.
The brothel was an old motel with six rooms and a lounge, where the girls looked bored and yawned on a long sofa between shifts. Conroy found Drummond Joe on the roof, replacing shingles split apart in last month’s hail storm. “Shame they don’t last,” he called down to Conroy. “These days, my knees are too creaky for ladders.”
“Your balls drop any lower, they’d be Oregon.”
“I’m not the one who’s paying.”
It was seven o’clock and most of the girls were half-asleep. Three sat on the sofa, none at the kitchen table. In the past, Joe had offered his guests sausage made from local pigs. That evening, however, he was too tired to give Conroy anything more than a glass of Chivas Regal.
“Seen Favre?”
“Who?”
“The sheriff.”
“Not for weeks,” Joe said. “Know they’re running girls over on the res? I can’t compete with their prices, but they can’t compete with my girls. Isn’t that right, Miss Eden?”
He was addressing a woman at the end of the couch, a round blonde with short wavy hair who wore a choker. She sat staring at her phone, oblivious to Joe.
“She never gets calls,” he said. “Know why? Because she doesn’t have ears.”
“I got ears,” she said.
“Sometimes, you know, the girls ask me to sing. For their ears. Thirty years ago, I was living in Los Angeles. Peddled my ass on the Strip. I mean, not like Miss Eden here, but as a musician. Sometimes we drag out the keyboard for a little ‘Home Sweet Home.’”
“I’ll take her,” Conroy said.
He spent half an hour with the blonde. Their bedroom had a vinyl curtain and white roses in bottles on the table. Conroy dressed in a hurry: the hockey game started at nine and he hated missing the first period.
The other girls had left Joe’s lounge. The pimp sang a ballad to one of the mirrors, ruffling his hair as he made kissing noises. “Leaving?” Joe said to Conroy. “I’m all alone, Johnny Boy. Let’s drink some Chivas, talk about the bovine.” He poured out a glass of scotch and handed it to Conroy, who sat down in a black and tan chair with teeth marks on its legs. “Good sense,” Joe said. “Enjoy a gift when given to you. Sooner or later, it’s all gone.”
Conroy said, “Not me. I’m living forever.”
“That’s right, Joe said. “What’s your name again?”
“You know my name.”
“Right...”
Conroy arrived late at the sports hall. During the second intermission, he bought a thin and foamy beer and sipped it in the middle of an empty row of seats. By the final whistle, his spine ached from pressing against the hard plastic chair. He finished the beer, then drove back home to Carcassonne.
On the road, he got a ring from Drummond Joe: “The girl here… Miss Eden… she’s dripping…”
“This is why you called?”
“You didn’t ask,” Joe said. “I mean, about the drip.”
“You drunk or what? What kind of drip, Joe?”
“An afterbirth. Slid right out, all over my Tajik rug. I want you to pay for it. I mean, someday when you send it to college…”
“Bye.”
“Expect to hear from my lawyer,” Joe said. “We’re all alone here, you know?”
***
Conroy waited for Esposito and his men. His shotgun was laid across the kitchen table, a revolver or automatic in each drawer along the counter. He went out to move the fence posts and thought about his future. He could pull a number of jobs in Washington—the banks had little cash, less security. After all, it was the sticks. A ditch cut in the ground by ancient floods. That afternoon Conroy woke stiff on the floor when he heard Jed’s knocking.
“That Angus ran through my field,” Jed said. “Next time, I really will shoot the bastard. Right between his stupid eyes. Think I won’t? That I’ll stand on your doorstep forever?”
Conroy had passed out drinking wine. He rubbed his face, gazing at the gray hills a mile behind his visitor. “What makes you think,” he said, “you can stand here bawling like a baby? You’re a pair of wet diapers? Maybe you’ll squat down, take a shit?”
“I’ve said what you need to hear. Your heifers are skinny, the calves are half-dead, and that Angus gets two in his brain if he sets a single hoof on my patch.”
He was ranting and waving his arms when Conroy slammed the butt of the revolver against Jed’s nose, then shoved him to the foot of the stairs. Jed was still rolling in the mud as the man born Francis Petruzzi pointed the barrel at his chest. “Come here again with this crap,” Conroy said, “you get a third hole. I promise it won’t be your favorite.”
“Scumbag.”
“Who cares about land?” Conroy said. “It’s all drying up south of Spokane. When the grass dies, the herd’s got nothing to eat. So… what’s left? One morning, you wake up and your left foot’s gone. Because they’re hungry.”
He kicked Jed’s hip with his boot, hard enough to get him moving, and his neighbor hobbled over to the access road.
***
Conroy didn’t feel like going outside, much less to the general store. He boiled a pot of water and threw in a handful of spaghetti. Ten minutes later, Conroy searched for tomato sauce. He looked under the sink, behind the couch, below each of the dressers. He doubted any jars were in the wall safe. Disgusted, Conroy tore up the limp noodles and stuffed them in the sink. He’d find another time for dinner.
The next day he walked out to the stream, where five of his heifers lay dead on the western bank. Someone had set up a trough and fed them poisoned grain. They were hungry enough to trust a stranger—Conroy blamed himself.
He sat by one of the heifers and thought of feed lots. He’d eat the Angus, then invest the rest of his pill money outside Whitman. He’d fatten those herds on barley, durum wheat, chick peas, oats, and potatoes. The flesh would get nice and marbled, close to bursting from their hides.
Conroy thought of Alicia, too—her legs, small movements in the morning when he brought her coffee. She could have slept until noon every day; he wondered if she was asleep, or wondering about him.
He left the dead cattle on the bank and went home. Turning left in the doorway, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: there was a smear of cow shit across his cheek. He aimed the revolver, fired, and watched the glass fall to the floor. He couldn’t smell his face. Now he no longer had to see it. Then he approached the kitchen window. He was too tired to open it or scrub his cheek, so he shot out the window, too. Conroy was ready to fire again when his phone rang. “Where are you?” he said.
“Somewhere,” Alicia said.
“Safer at home.”
“I don’t think so. Baby, we all heard the jackhammer... When you left brains all over the barn, I had no choice.”
“We had a problem. I solved it. You and Junior will never get hurt. And once we start buying feed lots—”
“Feed lots?”
“I’m done with all this working-the-land bullshit. The dirt follows you.”
“Turn yourself in. If the cops bust you at the ranch, it’ll be worse.”
“No cop is busting me, sweetie. They’re weak. They’ve chased me all my life and think I’m trapped. But thinking is different from knowing. You and Junior will come home. It’s the only way.”
“I loved John Conroy, not Frank Petruzzi. And you didn’t fool me—I did that myself.”
“Let’s hear Junior.”
The line went dead; Conroy cursed Nico. He wanted to dig up the body and cut it into smaller pieces: an ear, a few fingers, both feet. Was it a grave if you only buried a foot? Sooner or later, Nico’s friends would be in Carcassonne…
Conroy took an old paperback of Moby Dick from his sock drawer. In the dining room, he laid his gun on the tablecloth and tried to read the back cover. He wondered who would call a book Moby Dick. It reminded him of Dick Calabria from Roxbury, who no longer used his first name and wasn’t even named Richard…
For years, he’d hidden the novel from Alicia, embarrassed that he couldn’t understand it, and yet had carried the dog-eared copy wherever he moved: Boston to Halifax, Montreal to Vancouver, Seattle to the scablands. Conroy chose a page near the end. He was squinting his eyes at the tiny print when he heard twigs snapping outside on the hill. He picked up his gun and went to the window.
The Angus had returned to the ranch. It stood outside the corral, looking ahead as if it expected to be led inside. The black steer snorted and stamped its hooves in the mud.
“Hey boy,” Conroy said. “How did you get out?” He blinked, then pointed the revolver between the steer’s eyes. It did not flinch or bellow when the gun jammed. Conroy laughed, tossed it on the ground. “Get out of here. Go back to Jed’s, or that trough by the river. You got no place on this ranch. Leave, before I get hungry.”
A sheriff’s cruiser parked in the driveway. Conroy felt no fear; he gave the Angus a pat on the head. Two men dressed in plainclothes left the car. He looked away from the steer, from the deputies, over to the rows of basalt across the highway.
“Is this your cattle?” the short man said.
Conroy said nothing. The tall man bent over and picked up the revolver. “We’re asking a question,” he told Conroy.
“No,” Conroy said. “Not any more. My name’s Frank. Frank Petruzzi.”
“We know, asshole.”
The short man reached inside his jacket and yelled out that Conroy had a gun. Conroy smirked, then kept smirking as the bullets ripped apart his liver, spleen, and lungs. He slumped next to the split-rail corral. The tall man began untangling his legs.
“The hell you doing?”
“He fell kind of twisted,” the tall man said. “By the time someone finds the body, it’ll be frozen in place. All knotted up.”
“I doubt Frank’s going to heaven. Hey, check for cigarettes in his jacket. I’m dying out here and it’s a long drive back to Revere.”
“Lucky for you, I don’t smoke.”
“What?”
The tall man pulled out a .32 with a suppressor and shot his partner twice in the throat. “Esposito wants it this way,” he said. “Easier. And hey, at least you’re not alone. We both know how it works…”
He drove off in the cruiser, looking back in his mirrors at the gate and the Angus. When the tall man reached the top of the hill, neither moved.
-- Max Thrax is managing editor of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL and author of God Is a Killer. His novel Loose Blood, the first part of a Boston crime trilogy, will be published in 2026.